All about application performance monitoring

As more companies do business online, applications aren’t just another part of an organization’s business. Instead, they are something a business relies on. So, if there are performance issues, the company might not grow as quickly as it might otherwise.

Plus, today’s customers expect products to function quickly and flawlessly. If there are issues, you need to resolve them almost instantly. In this AppOptics blog you can find the steps to get started with APM, and in this article, we’ll be taking a look at application performance monitoring and how you can make it work for your organization to grow your company.

About APM

With APM tools, it’s easy to determine whether or not your organization is meeting operating standards. Then you can look for potential problems and offer visitors a quality user experience. APM solutions often allow the IT team to gain enough information to directly connect business outcomes with a product’s performance. The goal is to find and fix any issues before they negatively impact a user’s experience.

A good APM solution also lets you know when users are negatively affected. It tells you how they are affected and wherein their experience the issue happened. That way, you can try to prevent similar issues in the future. It’s highly valuable for any IT team, and while application performance management is also known as APM, these are two different concepts. Application performance management is a broader process and is used to ensure everything performs perfectly. Monitoring is only part of that solution.

What APM Solutions Look at

If you want to get started with application monitoring, the trick is to understand how well business transactions work. To do that, it looks at each app to see if it is functioning normally. If it is not, then it will get information on the issue, whether that is the infrastructure or the product itself. An APM tool will analyze the data and determine how it impacts your business. Then it can change the environment to try to lessen the issue and prevent similar ones from happening again. The right tool can collect data on nearly any aspect that might affect the availability of access. But there are a few performance metrics that are most often looked at.

Metrics to Monitor

With real-time application monitoring, it often looks at error rates, which includes the number of issues and how often they occur. For instance, sometimes web requests cause an error. You’ll also want to look at the average response time, which tracks whether the performance is being affected by speed. The number of instances is also tracked. It is critical to know the number of server instances running at any given time.

An APM tool might allow autoscaling, and that allows you to scale the product to meet the demands of users. One of the most critical metrics is how satisfied customers are with the user experience. There are several ways that might be measured, and you can then compare that against a baseline. You might also look at the uptime, which looks at whether the app is available and online.

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